Cal leaned against the cold concrete wall of the hotel he’d hid inside, scanning the crowd moving along in the city below.

  "We need more memories," Nyx said, breaking the silence.

  Cal rubbed his temples. "You mean you need more memories."

  "And you need more money," Nyx countered. "Which means work. Preferably something that won’t have half the city gunning for you."

  Cal sighed. She wasn’t wrong. He’d been saving up for some time in hopes of leaving his life as a salvager behind, but he was nowhere near ready to afford to leave his work for an extended period of time.

  “Only problem is that my last job didn’t go as planned, I only managed an incomplete download before you know what. The broker won’t be pleased.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. I’ve already taken care of his memories. Had to delete traces of my presence anyway—made the files look complete while I was at it.”

  Cal raised an eyebrow at this. "Fine. Let’s go see the broker."

  The man Cal only knew as the broker. Did his business in the basement of a nightclub Cal figured he must own. Cal could feel the low reverberation of music thumping through his body from the speakers above him as he entered the room. The broker sat at a mahogany desk, bodyguards standing either side of him impassively.

  The broker sat staring at a display of rapidly scrolling data, his appearance as unsettling as ever—pale, almost waxy skin stretched over a skeletal frame, and cybernetic eyes that glowed faintly in the dim light.

  He studied Cal with mild surprise. "Well, well. I figured you were dead. I heard about what happened."

  "Good to see you too," Cal muttered, placing the stolen data on the table. "It’s not complete, but it’s close."

  The broker tapped a console, scanning the files. His lips curled into a thin smirk. “Huh. Looks whole to me. Lucky break.”

  “Told you.” Nyx’s voice hummed with smug satisfaction.

  “Got any more work?” Cal asked. “Something low profile.”

  The broker steepled his fingers. “Low profile, hmm… Ever broken into a morgue?”

  Cal exhaled. “More times than I’d like to admit.”

  The broker’s grin widened.

  Morgue jobs were usually simple. Security was lax—no one expected thieves to have an interest in the dead.

  Cal moved between rows of metal slabs, the air thick with antiseptic and something faintly rancid beneath it. The body he was looking for—a man named Garrick Duval—lay on the farthest table. His cybernetic implants were still intact. The police hadn’t realized who they had yet.

  “Just download, wipe the implants, and leave,” he muttered.

  “Or,” Nyx chimed in, “you could take more.”

  Cal hesitated. “That wasn’t the job.”

  "Since when do you care about playing it safe? I can process and compress the memories. Think about what we could learn."

  Cal stared at the other bodies. Before, he could barely store one person’s memories without burning out. But with Nyx? He swallowed.

  "Fine."

  He connected his neural cable to Duval’s implant and initiated the transfer. With Nyx inside his head, the job was nothing like his previous ones. He not only stored the data as he did previously, he could understand it as the memories flowed into him. Images flickered in his mind—gun deals, back-alley cybernetics, bodies left in gutters. It was obvious to Cal why someone wouldn’t want the police probing around Garrick’s implants.

  Then, a shift—his perspective blurred. He was in a bar, surrounded by familiar faces. His vision swam, head pounding, chest tightening. Pain bloomed, sharp and consuming, spreading like fire through his veins. He gasped for air, but his body convulsed—then darkness.

  Cal jerked back to reality, panting over Duval’s corpse.

  “That last one?” Nyx’s voice was quiet. “Overdose.”

  Cal grimaced, shaking the sensation from his limbs. As he wiped the implant clean and moved to the next a message appeared in his HUD.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  [Uploading Memories]

  One by one, he plugged himself into every body that had working implants. Flashes of lives playing before his eyes—doctors, criminals, everyday people. Skills, knowledge, fragments of identities slipping into his own mind. The rush was overwhelming, his vision darkening at the edges—

  He started keeping the faces of the bodies sheathed as he reached for their neural jacks, looking down at the bodies felt almost surreal to Cal after experiencing their memories. Then, something changed.

  A presence. Not just data. A voice.

  You shouldn’t have done that.

  Cal turned back to the rows of bodies, his breath still coming fast. His eyes flicked over the metal slabs, searching.

  Then he saw it.

  The last corpse he had touched, Cal realised then that none of the memories of the last body had appeared in his vision.

  The sheet covering it had slipped slightly, revealing a gaunt, emaciated face. The skin was taut, nearly translucent, stretched over sharp cheekbones and hollow sockets. A thin layer of frost clung to the exposed flesh, as if the body had been pulled from deep freeze only moments ago.

  But what made Cal’s stomach lurch was the eyes.

  They weren’t clouded, like a normal corpse’s should be. They were wide open, staring—pupils dilated so far the irises were nearly swallowed whole. And though the body didn’t move, though it was undeniably dead, something about it felt… aware.

  Its cybernetics were minimal. A small neural port behind one ear. Subdermal plating around the temples, almost invisible beneath the skin. But he felt something inside those implants had spoken to him. Had seen him.

  Cal tried not to panic, he pushed the body back into refrigeration. A nameplate on the table read:

  Subject 43A – UNIDENTIFIED

  No cause of death. No records attached. Just a nameless corpse, dumped here like an afterthought.

  Cal took a step back. A deep instinct—something primal—urged him to burn it.

  Instead, he forced himself to move to the console by the wall. His fingers trembled as he pulled up the logs.

  Date of intake: Three days ago.

  Found: Abandoned sector, no ID, no known affiliations.

  Status: DO NOT PROCESS. AWAIT COLLECTION.

  Cal’s pulse spiked.

  “Nyx,” he whispered. “I feel like we’ve made a mistake.”

  Nyx’s voice was quiet. “Yeah. I see that now.”

  Cal turned back to the body.

  The condensation on its skin was moving.

  Not melting. Not running in rivulets.

  It was shifting—as if something beneath the flesh was breathing.

  His skin prickled.

  Then, from deep inside his mind, the voice returned.

  You shouldn’t have done that.

  A surge of static crashed through his neural link. His vision fractured.

  And for a split second—just before everything snapped back into focus—he saw something inside the corpse stir.

  Cal ran, bolting down the cold, sterile hallway, his breath sharp in his throat. The morgue’s fluorescents flickered overhead, casting jagged shadows as he moved. His boots slammed against the tiled floor, the noise deafening in the silence.

  "Nyx!" he hissed. "What the hell was that?"

  "No idea," Nyx admitted, her voice tighter than usual. "But I suggest we don’t stick around to find out. I’m dumping that last data packet now."

  Cal wasn’t about to argue. His neural implant still buzzed from the static surge, a phantom pressure at the base of his skull. He didn’t dare look back.

  At the exit, he punched the release panel. The door hissed open, revealing a dimly lit alley behind the morgue. He slipped through, moving fast, but not before one last flicker of movement caught his eye—the morgue lights dimming. A mechanical whine, low and distorted, rattled the walls.

  Then—silence.

  The door sealed shut behind him.

  Cal forced himself to keep walking, his fingers flexing as the adrenaline burned through his veins. Too close. He’d done morgue jobs before, but nothing like this. Nothing that left a presence inside his mind.

  "You okay?" Nyx asked, her voice softer now.

  Cal exhaled slowly. "Yeah. Let’s just get to the broker."

  The nightclub’s bass pounded in his chest as Cal stepped inside, a dim glow painting the room in shifting reds and blues.

  He pushed through the crowd toward the back, slipping past dancers and corpo-types looking to forget themselves for a few hours. At the far wall, a heavy-set bouncer gave him a once-over, then jerked his head toward the basement door.

  Cal descended the narrow stairwell, the music muffled but still present—a heartbeat under the floor.

  The broker sat at his usual spot, behind a mahogany desk too expensive for a man in his line of work. His bodyguards flanked him, impassive as ever. The broker barely glanced up from his console as Cal approached.

  "You look like shit," the broker said.

  "Feel like it too," Cal muttered, tossing an encrypted drive onto the desk. "Job’s done."

  The broker tapped the device, scanning its contents. His expression remained unreadable, but Cal noticed the subtle shift in his posture—the faintest tightening of his shoulders.

  "You sure this is everything?" the broker asked, his voice casual. Too casual.

  Cal frowned. "That’s what was on him."

  The broker exhaled through his nose, drumming his fingers against the desk. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The bodyguards remained motionless, though Cal could feel the weight of their gazes.

  Finally, the broker gave a slow nod. "Alright. Payment’s transferred."

  Cal’s neural HUD pinged with the incoming credits. The amount was fair—nothing exceptional, but not suspiciously low either. Then why did it feel like he’d just stepped over a tripwire?

  "One more thing," the broker said, tapping at his console. "Your name came up earlier. Someone’s been asking about you."

  Cal’s jaw tightened. "Who?"

  The broker smirked, but there was no amusement in it. "No names. Just a request for information. I turned them away, of course. I don’t do free favours."

  Cal exhaled through his nose, resisting the urge to curse. He had enemies, sure—but this was different. If someone had gone through the trouble of tracking him through the broker’s network, it meant they were serious.

  "Anything else?" Cal asked, keeping his voice even.

  The broker studied him for a moment before shaking his head. "Not unless you’re looking for more work. I’ve got a job lined up. High risk, but the payout’s good."

  Cal hesitated. He wanted to say no. To take the creds and disappear for a while, figure out what the hell had happened back in the morgue.

  But that mystery—the voice, the static, the presence, it wasn’t something he could outrun. He needed resources. He needed information.

  And right now, the best way to get both was to stay in the game.

  "...What’s the job?" he asked.

  The broker’s grin widened. "Atta boy."